News Archives

Apple Focuses on Adding Value to Our Lives – Competitors Don’t

The Mac Observer’s John Martellaro observes that when the corporate need for wealth, fueled by pervasive advertising, outstrips the funds and time of customers, there is technological pushback, because that’s when customers start looking more carefully at the concept of value, and why they learn to love Apple.

Martellaro notes that while things Apple provides are not always excessively flashy, they are fundamental to human lives. For example, the iPad delivered millions from the tyranny of PCs and Windows. And Apple appears to have a strong interest in helping us monitor our health and fitness and has always focused on the positive aspects of life: music, FaceTime and family, movies of our children, photo albums, and the security of our computing devices.

Apple retail stores are always crowded, Martello saya, not because people have a materialistic obsession with geek toys, but in his experience, because they know they can find elegant solutions to life problems that have real value.

On the other hand, he contends, companies that aren’t very good at creating value for customers because of their culture or obsession with wealth deceive customers in two ways. First, lower quality means more money in their pockets, less in yours, at least in total cost of ownership. Second, to compensate, they create an artificial sense of value through feature comparisons — a ploy PC-makers have employed in their advertising since the ’90s, and with considerable sales success. Martellaro observes that it works, in many cases, because customers are gullible enough to be seduced into believing that more features = more value.